Note 16 — PART I TERRITORIAL STUDIES (continued 2)

Of the latter date I disposed in my paper 'The Creation of the Earldom of Gloucester',16 in which I showed that Robert did not become Earl till several years later. The other evidence, if it cannot be disproved, cannot at least, be relied on. For, without asserting that the chronicle assigned to 'Peter of Blois' is so daring a forgery as the 'Historia Ingulphi', of which it is a 'continuatio', it must be plainly described as absolutely untrustworthy. Apart from the passage on Cambridge University,17 we have a description 'Inclyti Comitis Leycestriæ Roberti tunc validissimi adolescentis, burgensiumque suæ dictæ civitatis' in 1113, and of his presence, with his knights, at the laying of the Abbey foundation stones next year.18 Now the future Earl of Leicester was some nine years old at the time, and his father, the Count of Meulan, lived till 1118. So also, about the year 1114 we meet with 'Milonis Comitis Herfordensis', who did not become Earl of Hereford till 1141, and whose father, Walter of Gloucester, was living long after 1114; while on the next page we find the notoriously false Countess Lucy legend, with the additional blunder of converting her son, the Earl of Lincoln, into her husband's brother!19 It is in the midst of all this that we have the vital passage on which Mr Waters relies: